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Sunday, November 22

What happened to the Halo Movie?

Let's just say Denzel Washington's Trip to Wellington in New Zealand turned out to be a big waste of his time.

New Zealand's Godfather of Film, Peter Jackson had done the deals and was set to produce a silver screen version of the Halo universe till things crashed and burned like a Pelican crashing and burning on a beach.

During 2005 - 2007, the stars, both metaphorical and literal, were aligning.

Initially Alex Garland, a novelist known for the script of his own novel, The Beach had handed over a script for Halo that covered the time frame of The Fall of Reach. Legend has it that Mr Garland was paid $1 million by Microsoft (who own the rights to Halo) to write the adaptation of Halo. Microsoft then sold the script to Universal for $10 million.

Enter Mr Jackson, King of the World after LOTR and King Kong. Let's make a Halo movie, he said.

Things were in production. Bungie was in cahoots, helping out with the canon and helping foster the film's development.

Neil Blomkamp at the time an unknown ingénue who had built a strong reputation as a director of commercials was in Wellington preparing the film. Blomkamp directed a trilogy of live-action Halo short films (known collectively as Landfall) to promote the release of the Xbox 360 game Halo 3.

They even made a real live Warthog jeep. Denzel flew into Wellington. Would he be playing Sergeant Johnson?

And then Hollywood took a royal dump on the whole shebang.

Production was put on ice. Best laid plans were sucked into the suck. The big wigs in Hollywood chickened out and canceled the Halo movie. Grown men wept and Denzel Washington left was never to utter the line "I know what the ladies like" in a movie.

Blomkamp had this telling thing to say "It's not so much me as the entire vessel sank. Basically, it was a combination of; there were two studios involved that weren't getting along in the process of making it, Universal and Fox. That kind of stuff happens, it's a fragile industry. So the film collapsed at the end of last year, and it's been dead, ever since then. I'll be curious to see what happens."

So fuck you Universal and Fox.

In 2009, scriptwriter Stuart Beattie tried to get the Halo juices flowing again with his own spec script. It was rumored that Steven Speilberg blew his load on the script but it was a galaxy too far and the Halo movie is happening no more.